This male ocelot was found dead on Texas 100 between Laguna Vista and Los Fresnos on July 9, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported Thursday afternoon.

Photo By Courtesy Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife

Ocelots typically live for about ten years in the wild but have been known to live longer. One female ocelot on the Laguna Atascosa Refuge was first found as a two-week old kitten and was tracked for 11 years.

Photo By Courtesy Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife

To learn more about ocelots, biologists use a special scent pad, which they place in an area they think ocelots travel. The cats will often rub their cheek against the pad to leave their scent as a way of letting other ocelots know they have been there. The scent pad is like a comb and ’catches’ hairs of the cat, which can then be used to analyze the ocelot’s DNA. Biologists will also place a motion sensor camera nearby and the photographs are then used to match to the hair samples and identify different ocelots.

Photo By Courtesy Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife

Ocelots stand about a foot high. Adults weigh 15-30 pounds and measure about 3’ long from their nose to the tip of their tail. Ocelots have a long ringed or barred tail and their rounded ears are black with a single, large white spot. An ocelot’s fur is white underneath and buff above, with black bars, spots and streaks all over. Just as each human has unique fingerprints, each ocelot has unique markings on its fur.

Photo By COURTESY PHOTO/Courtesy Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife

One of estimated 100 endangered ocelots left in the United States is caught on a trip camera at the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in the Rio Gande Valley. Courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildlife.

Photo By Courtesy Photo/U.S. Fish and Wildlife

The South Texas brush is made up of thorny and dense plants. It looks uninviting and painful to humans but to ocelots the thick brush means protection from danger, shade from the heat, shelter for sleeping, dens for having kittens and a place to call home. This is a photo of a female and her young investigating something in the brush.

Photo By U.S. Fish & Wildlife

A new ocelot kitten was discovered at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge earlier this month.

Photo By U.S. Fish & Wildlife

A new ocelot kitten was discovered at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge earlier this month.

Photo By U.S. Fish & Wildlife

A new ocelot kitten was discovered at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge earlier this month.

Photo By U.S. Fish & Wildlife

A new ocelot kitten was discovered at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge earlier this month.

Photo By U.S. Fish & Wildlife

An adult ocelot roams at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge in South Texas.

Photo By U.S. Fish & Wildlife

An adult ocelot roams at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge in South Texas.

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LOS FRESNOS — To the motorist who killed it, the animal might have been an unfortunate instance of late-night road kill, a stray something-or-other darting from the greenery lining an irrigation ditch on the highway to South Padre Island.

But the passerby who found the spotted carcass along Texas 100 that morning in early May knew it was a wild ocelot — one of the fewer than 50 remaining in the United States.

Mourning shot through the community of biologists fighting to keep the population from extinction.

“When there's so few ocelots, we're always concerned about losing another one,” said Kelly McDowell, project leader for the South Texas Refuge Complex, which has been conducting extensive research and public outreach about the ocelots. “We're hoping that maybe we're just hearing more about things … But that may be naive, too.”

Ocelots once roamed Texas's coastal prairie up into Louisiana and Arkansas, but habitat fragmentation and hunting depleted their numbers. There was rejoicing last week when a trip camera at the Laguna Atascosa Wildlife Refuge captured a second kitten born to a female named Esperanza (Hope), but for the most part the U.S. subspecies has been dying out.

Vehicles accounted for about half the South Texas ocelot deaths documented in the past 30 years.

Six months ago, an ocelot was found dead on a roadway leading through the Refuge. Park officials responded by adding signs and speed bumps and lengthening the hours of dusk-to-dawn road closure.

Last month's road death of a young male roughly 3 years old prompted an “I told you so” to state transporta- tion officials. Texas 100 runs east to west, bisecting the north-south path of such juvenile ocelots who search the Rio Grande delta, if not northern Mexico, for turf and a mate.

A maze for cats

Engineers in 2007 split portions of the highway with miles-long concrete barriers, turning what had been an obstacle of open space into a veritable maze for the cats.

Biologists advocated raised sections of roadway along known wildlife crossings in areas of thick vegetation to allow animals to pass underneath under almost continuous plant cover, McDowell said. TxDOT did put in one underpass, but used a series of low rectangular openings for the rest of the wall.

The design, he said, “was not the one we were proposing at all.”

Biologists fearing the limitations of the South Texas habitat, isolated for now in the refuge area and on a ranch in Willacy County, have long urged for preservation of extended corridors of dense shrub. The cat was 12 to 15 miles from the refuge when it approached the highway just east of Los Fresnos.

The concrete barrier was a response to head-on vehicle collisions, TxDOT Engineer Arnold Cortez said. Its design involved full coordination with state and local environmental agencies.

“We realized there was some thick brush and Parks and Wildlife wanted us to address some kind of opening for the ocelot mainly,” he said. “We tried to mitigate that the best we could to accommodate that.”

Cortez said he himself had seen a bobcat duck through a similar opening on nearby Texas 48. And he said a wildcat could certainly jump something only 3 feet, six inches high.

But it doesn't usually work that way, McDowell said.

“They get stuck in the road, they're going to keep trying to move across that road. And if they keep hitting that barrier they're certainly going to be on that road a lot longer than they need to be, which is going to make them more susceptible to being run over,” he said.

Highway wildlife crossings debuted decades ago in population-dense Europe, and are now found in wilderness areas in the United States and Canada.

Shooting galleries

There are about 215 human fatalities from animal-vehicle collisions each year in the United States and many more injuries, so the crossings are not just about protecting animals, he said. But in the past decade their use has expanded to cover smaller species that pose less of a threat to motorists, such as culverts for reptiles.

U.S. Department of Transportation spokesman Doug Hecox said federal appropriations allow states plenty of leeway in road design, with 10 percent of a state's chunk of highway funding available for options such as bike and pedestrian paths and wildlife crossings.

“Texas has been one of the big states in wildlife crossings implementation,” he said. “It's an ongoing challenge, but we're always looking for ways to do better.”